


Unseen by Daylight

by InkfaceFahz



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: 1990s, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Family Dynamics, Family Member Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Japanese Literary Motif -- Modernist & Contemporary, Other, Plants, Seasonal, The Takeda Sisters/Cousins Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 20:22:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30010446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkfaceFahz/pseuds/InkfaceFahz
Summary: “Children retain a great deal, and when they grow up they start going over things and rejudging them from a grownup's point of view. This must have been this way, and that was that way, they say. That's why you have to be careful with children—some day they grow up.”― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Some Prefer NettlesIttetsu knows the change of the seasons is immutable. Curiously, however, it appears the Moniwas keep finding themselves mired in the limbo between summer and autumn.
Kudos: 4





	Unseen by Daylight

“I pity him now. I realized he had no hatred for us, but himself.”

* * *

The day my brother was born, the last, soft, overripe peach fell from the trees my father planted a bit over a decade prior, a year before I was born. These were trees he had driven up from his hometown. They were the answer to his request for my grandparents blessing to marry the eldest Takeda sister, packed in soil in the bed of a truck, as mother described it, on a perfect day to drive into the future. 

It was the last season for these trees. Once they were cut, a new rotation would spring forth from the packets and piles of seed catalogs he left all over the house -- snow pea, strawberries, comfrey and dandelion seemed to be enlisted this year -- and eventually the new trees were to be brought in and planted, and they would grow, fruit, and die. 

The day my brother was born my grandfather died of what turned out to be cancer, neglected, unspoken, an invasive species run amok. I remembered trips to Fukushima and how sweet the persimmons and peaches were in contrast to his acrid tobacco smoke. I would never disassociate it from comfort.

My younger brother was born on September 6th, 1994. My grandfather, Moniwa Yoshi, died the same day. Like replanting a cutting from a plant to let it go on, my sibling’s name harvested a kanji from his, but read as “Kaname”. 

The next day I came home from school, knowing my mother was still at the hospital, likely with her mother, and her father likely at work. If my father was not meeting Kaname, he, I thought, would be working at his friend’s farm; the rice had ripened, more hands were needed, so I came home expecting it to be empty. Instead it was the first time I had seen my father without a liveliness, his breath smelling as sweet and fermented as the smashed stone fruit outside. 

I don’t hate the smell, but the context. I hate it clinging to him just as the fibrous strands of rotting flesh cling to the pit of the peach. 

* * *

“Natsu, please come. You’ll save a lot of trouble, and they deserve to fruit a few years from now.” 

“Huh, little brother? I was preoccupied,” Natsuo offhandedly says into the speakerphone, a halfhearted attempt at a half-truth. He holds a bottle and a large baby, his priorities jaggedly torn between brother and son.

“Come on. The persimmons. The peaches. Bring them up there when you have a chance. Mom can’t afford to hire a field hand, and she never ran it as a pick-your-own operation.” 

Ittetsu overhears this conversation while studying. His mother at work, so her own mother sat with the doors to the garden open, a regimented row of destruction, cups and plates in their deformed state as she gently burnished a bowl of the excess gold powder. She herself does little ceramic work, but she had, since long before Ittetsu was born, resurrected it in this fashion. She holds what was and will once again be an incense burner. The unspoken knowledge they shared was that Natsuo’s inebriation smashed it, An accident, it seemed. 

They’re just accidents, he told himself. 

People have accidents. 

They can even make them more than once, his heart rate increasing as he sees his father carry his youngest outside after turning off his own brother like an appliance. Unlike the field and orchard, and the wired-off space to eventually house chickens, the back garden of the house was primarily flowers, and herbs, and was kept free of equipment, tools, and litter, both due to the strictures of Grandmother’s aesthetics and to prevent any such accidents.

But even without precaution, they don’t always have accidents, he reminds himself. Secretly, inside his chest, he is afraid that among them there was wreckage that was not _accidents_. 

His grandmother picks up another accident and her lacquer, her gaze surveying her domain, then stopping at Ittetsu. 

“You miswrote Miyazawa-san’s name,” she points to his literature assignment. 

“Oh, thank you baasan,” he said quietly, “Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”

“No, I think you were. Children retain a great deal. It was merely your hand that was not thinking for a moment.” 

“Your hands are always thinking.”

“They don’t have the same energy as our brains, no matter how hard we try.” She glances over to the entranceway and sees her daughter returning home. Her hair flyaway. Her scrubs disheveled. That air that being the eldest daughter always conferred is now humid and dank. 

"I'm back," she calls, her voice small. 

"Welcome home." Grandmother looks at him. “Itte, I think you should finish studying in your room,” his grandmother directs and he defers to her real instruction _please leave_ , but only till halfway up the stairs. This wasn’t a new house, so the boards were showing wear, and sound carried. In his mind, the conversation he hears is fleshed out into script from a play.

“I can't take it. I want to quit. I want him to quit.” He hears the kettle click, and one women’s weight heavily settles in the sitting room.

**“** I want to go back to private care. I would be making twice as much. I have a doctorate and I’m a _surgical assistant_. I want my colleagues to stop treating me as the cute little lady who brings them tea instead of their senior.” His mother does not speak helplessly in front of him. This is strange, to Ittetsu.

His grandmother speaks, her sharpness trying to lend itself to her daughter before the structure collapses. “I do hate these chauvinists. How is it, that we still haven’t made a climate too inhospitable for them to survive. Just like with everything else, women have to work harder, but how much can one reasonably expect, neh?”

“And when I come home --” 

She stops speaking as Ittetsu hears two quiet taps against the table, and a more delicate sound as his grandmother sits.

“Thank you for the tea, Mother.” There is a silence.

“If it is any reassurance, I don’t think he drank today. He was on the phone with his brother a little while ago, and I saw him step out to the back garden, holding Kaname. He has been showing him what different flowers look like.” Ittetsu remembers when Natsuo had taught him the words that people created to reflect the world. He peeks from the stairwell, at the spider lily and cosmos turning the garden into a portrait of a field on fire. 

Eiko finally speaks. “The sun’s still setting; You mean, he hasn’t drunk yet.” 

“He hasn’t been like this forever.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. Here I am, just griping. But I feel like -- For Kaname, he’s the world. For You and Father, with no sons… he’s done better than many --”

“Nao has horrible taste. At least in men,” his grandmother tangents into a critique of men Ittetsu barely knew. “Keizo’s fine, but I don’t like his family. But I’ve already noted those critiques. Extensively. Natsuo's mother and I get on extremely well for mother-in-laws.”

Eiko laughs tersely. It’s not a laugh that sounds like it wants to come from her mouth. 

“To Ittetsu… I think he’s barely keeping a mask on. Itte is smart. I think our eldest can see where it flakes off.” Ittetsu feels his chest tighten. Thinking about accidents.

“By the time it's just the two of us, it's not even there.”

“Men are like that. It takes a long time to train boorishness out of them, unless,” she prompts, “He hasn’t…”

“No, it's… the last year or two had poor yield, equipment needed repairs, Ittetsu’s high school entrance exams are next year and Ittetsu is so smart, he should go to a good school, then… his father never meeting his second child, Iesada and Masaichi struggle with him...”

“”He only has one shell to hide from himself anymore. The other night, he was drinking, he said something like, ‘Yumi-chan’s husband has such a good job, huh?’ and I said, “Yes.” and he asked if I was jealous, if I ever wish I had moved to Tokyo and found success. 

“I looked at him and said, “What are our beautiful children and living a life unburdened by the noise and stress and high impact glass and concrete, but success?” And he stared out at the garden.” Grandmother always waits. Eiko always speaks, in time. 

  
“Then he said, quietly, “Holding Kaname is the only happiness I’ve felt for months. And even that joy leaves a pain like poison, Ei.” Her voice is a quiet echo of another conversation. 

The fly on the wall, halfway up the stairs, feels a hand on his shoulder. His grandfather was both warm yet not, like a hot water bottle the moment you forget its soothing you, when you then realize it has grown tepid. He spoke to adults in a way that was overly formal, and children in a way that was simple, almost childish. He was not duplicitous; Different social settings warranted selecting different settings to operate under the rules of. He did not create nor encourage conflict. He was a mild man, but Ittetsu understood this to not fully capture a complete portrait of him. What details were missing, though, he could not fill in. 

“Ittetsu, I’ll help with your homework in your room, much more comfortable there. Mama and bachan probably need a little time alone. You’re like that too, aren’t you?” He whispers, and Ittetsu lets himself be led upstairs.

There is, however, no intervening in him hearing the last lines before the curtain closed on this act. 

“And I asked him, “Do you mean you don’t love me, love Ittetsu, anymore?” and he shouted no, but then stopped, only mumbling something about that happiness not belonging to him anymore… I was shaking, but I asked, ‘Would you like to separate?’”

“ And he said?”

‘“Would you?”’ 

“So, neither of you…”

Eiko’s tea is cold, now. 

“We just lay with our backs to each other, saying nothing, until Kaname stirred; I let him take care of it, thinking, “Well maybe, maybe, if he holds Kaname, that happiness will linger.” But it doesn’t.” Ittetsu rarely has ever heard his mother’s voice shatter. Like the incense burner, broken clumsily. An accident.

He briefly hates his father. He doesn't quite understand what that means. He doesn’t understand if it is his father. But his mother is a doctor; he has passively learned much from her about human injury. He knows she cannot be repaired with gold and lacquer. 

Ittetsu’s grandfather watches him, unsure how the middle schooler was processing what he heard. He has no intermediary-language, and no vocabulary to speak of these subjects to a child. If he was jealous of his new brother, if he understood what mask his mother meant.

Ittetsu loved his father. But in this short time, he perfectly understood how his father could love him without happiness. That began the mutual era, a history of empty hearts, but unwillingly crossing an endless field, drawn to refill them at a river that had long dried out, two souls in an empty summer, an overgrown, broken iron bridge and a river of stones, piled like a crumbling wall. Even when a torrential flood was orchestrated by a desperate woman, it only alleviated the drought for a moment, and one moved on looking for stronger stuff to fill his heart. 

Ittetsu reads, particularly after his grandparents pass away. His mother makes good on her career redirection, and joined a pediatric and rehabilitative care practice in Sendai. Kaname, now curious and crawling and crashing through places he shouldn’t, each time asking, “Can I learn to fix that?” Once he is entering primary school, Ittetsu would set him up with a book about woodworking or a cheap model kit to occupy him. He had too much to study. He couldn’t attend cram school, but he didn’t need the coaxing other students did; What he needed was a room of his own, an afternoon without being his brother’s keeper, even if Kaname was not a difficult child. Sometimes his mother and brother would go for a weekend to visit Aunt Yumeko and her own precocious son, or Kaname would spend time with their other cousin and his baby half-brother, isolated from the possibility of encountering a drunken Natsuo. 

By then the butsudan had gained four residents. All four grandparents now watched from there. Ittetsu recalls sadness, at each but they weren’t mortal wounds to him the way every one sent his father deeper into the well. Then suddenly, Uncle Iesada. The land and house in Fukushima prefecture was sold. His father disappeared for weeks and even upon returning was distant. Even Kaname couldn’t make him happy. 

“I need you to come with me this Sunday. It’s just an hour away,” His dad says coming in from the field one afternoon. It wasn’t a harsh order, or a gentle request: Just a statement. 

“All I have to finish is some reading, I can at least do that in the car. What do you need?” There isn’t any point in immediately escalating a point of contact; Sticks only spark a raging inferno if rubbed too hard.

“Iesada’s permissions and peaches. A few other things. They’re barely still adolescents, so there’s a chance they’ll survive transplanting. They’re already bagged and burlapped according to Masa, so you,” he eyes his, well, not-particularly-athletic-looking son while Ittetsu rolled his eyes back, “shouldn’t have too much trouble.” 

“Who’s Masa?” 

“Most people have friends, Ittetsu.” 

“Well, Father, our family has always been a little different,” he retorted, only earning a flash of anger on Natsuo’s face, “I just don't think I've met him, is all.” 

“Maybe a couple times at most," Natsuo concedes. "Iesada and he had a boat. Flounder, saury, hamachi. After Mom’s heart attack Masa moved into the house. He helped,” Natsuo's strained tone punctuates a strained explanation. It was strange, how concise and uninformative this was, and curious what his father had edited -- he suspected his uncle and Masa had publicly been, say, ‘cousins’ to their elderly neighbors, and something else in private. It was bizarre, like learning of a relative it was far too late to count as part of your family. 

“It’s an hour each way, at least. Is the truck big enough?” He asks, not pressing the issue -- was it even an issue? -- of Masa. 

“They’ll fit the flatbed. These are all left to sort out the affairs. I’m going to get some sheets from Mother and Father’s room, to protect the leaves,” Natsuo refers to his wife’s parents, and the conversation was done. Ittetsu eventually packs up his materials and heads upstairs noticing his father lingering in the room that now held storage with brief interludes of family, when they visited. Natsuo had built a bed frame to accommodate Aunt Yumeko, who no longer slept on futons. On the edge of that he sits, and he cries. Of course, Ittetsu wrinkled his nose, his father kept a stash of liquor in there; not his usual chutai and lager, but more costly things, stronger things, with labels in other languages sometimes, often from visiting buyers in suits sealing a deal for a season of fruit. Gifts horded away for their greater potency than the anesthetics he could afford daily. He also held something else from his toolbox. He talked to it like it was a telephone with Iesada at the other end. It appeared to have a bladed end, but it was closed, so instead of intervening, Ittetsu listened to gasps between gulps, pleas by the pour:

Why why iechi why 

Im sorry 

Why would you do that to him 

  
  


You found Dad you knew that pain

(imso sorry, im so, so sorry) 

I 

  
  


The loudest, clearest, most pained plea, 

Did you want to haunt me? Is that why? 

Are you cursing me?

Ittetsu feels like he has stolen from his father by catching this grief. It was grief that was supposed to die, and instead it would be preserved in his head as a specimen in the on-going study to understand his father. 

Death was a presence in life, and a subject the writers he was drawn to often explored. There was no-one he had ever seen for whom death destroyed him over and over like his father, despite the cycle of the seasons he labored under being just a schedule of life and death. Perhaps that makes it harder, when death chooses its own schedule. Ittetsu missed his grandparents, and he supposed he would react much differently if his mother or Kaname died -- 

\-- Ittetsu does not know how he would feel if his father died. This was the most disquieting feeling of alienation he had found so far. Unsure if he feels apathy, or if he feels too much; Disqualified from humanity, or an exemplar of it.

He enters his bedroom and shuts the door a little hard. 

He told himself he would never drink alone. It did something to his father that he did not understand. To distort one's psyche to exist amongst other people was one thing; To do so to quietly obliterate one's heart, a perennial that grew back every time with the hangover… 

* * *

It became Sunday. 

“Ittetsu, what exit is it, again?” 

The teenager looksup from Ougai Mori, which was already a strain due to his own taste in style rejecting it at first contact, while early morning light whiting out the pages didn't help. Thus, he wears an exasperated look on his face. 

“Have you forgotten?” He asks. Natsuo shoots him a look. 

“You’re going to begin driving soon, I want you to answer.” 

Ittetsu leans on the window and stares out. He knew some distance beyond the horizon was the Pacific Ocean, but in this moment he could not imagine a static place in the constantly moving cab of a bumpy truck on the E4 expressway. 

“Get off at Kunimi IC,” he replied. 

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Natsuo replies. Ittetsu bites his tongue and kept looking for the ocean outside the whirlwind of his family, but he could see nothing next to the eye of the storm. He absently picked up his other book. He was sick of the protagonist of Vita Sexualis because he reminded him too much of himself, but instead of obsessing over the omnipresent glimpses of sensuality and eroticism in culture, Ittetsu just saw the anesthetic for life in vending machines, on advertisements, on the side of a passing truck, at New Years on the uniforms sponsoring the Ekiden, to celebrate, to grieve, to exist. 

“-- What’s that one?” His dad asks. 

“Just a poetry collection.”

“Oh.”

He lets the book fall open to the middle of one of the pieces, he glances down. 

You walk at the correct tempo; 

You weave your straw hat piously. 

As if you’re almost a toy soldier, 

And every day is Sunday. 

  
  


He glances to the top of the piece and feels his stomach eat itself. 

When someone you love dies, 

You’ve got to kill yourself; 

Other than that, there’s nothing else to do.

But if your sins are deep and you go on living,

You should have a sense of service. 

Ittetsu does not read this aloud to his father. He contemplates grimly, to avoid talking to his heart, and thinks his father knows it anyway, even if he has never read it.

It is Sunday, and they cannot simply maintain the tempo of the expressway forever; They have a service to attend to, passed quiet shops and small shrines in rural Fukushima where all that was left of the Moniwas was an army of immature persimmon and peach saplings, and a man who is not a Moniwa. 

  
  


Masaichi is nice. He is large and muscular whereas the Moniwas are spindly and dextrous; tempered; So that at least, they did not snap immediately when you bent them. The house had nearly been emptied; Masa tells them he planned to move closer to the coast, and focus on fishing on his and Iesada’s vessel. When he speaks about it, and his uncle, Ittetsu could tell it was the only thing Iesada had left behind that did not make his heart ache. 

After they’ve finished loading the trees into the bed, and tucked them in with sheets and netting to avoid scraping their bark or letting the wind steal their foliage on their trip north, Masa pulls out a bottle of sake. Instantly Ittetsu’s mind gets anxious. To his knowledge, his father hasn’t drank today. 

“Masa, he’s still in high school,” Natsuo reminds him as they sit and look out at a fruitless farm. Ittetsu almost resents the pushback as much as he appreciates it. Masaichi ignores it. 

“Come on, he’s never had Fukushima sake! There’s no reason to hide it and pretend it doesn’t exist,” Masa insists and hands the teenager the bottle. 

“Here, I’ll teach him. There’s not much a guy like me can teach a smart kid like yours, but at least I can teach him the proper way to do things.” Masa turns the bottle in his hands, heavy like a club or bat, until the label is facing up. He guides the awkward death grip that makes Ittetsu appear to be strangling it into a more natural position, with his other hand supporting the base. Natsuo watches Ittetsu the entire time, and holds out his cup after his son has poured Masaichi’s serving. The sake is cloudy, and fragrant. The pour is meticulous. Natsuo looks at him. Ittetsu looks at the stream connecting them for a moment. Then the bottle is capped. 

Ittetsu likes it, actually; He would have expected himself to not be fond of it, but it doesn’t taste like his father. 

Though he does not know this, his father tastes it differently than most mouthfuls of alcohol he ingests these days. He does not usually taste alcohol; he simply feels it enter, get comfortable, dig deep. Mouthfeel, aroma… He had tuned these to cultivation, but that was now tinged by extra taste on the tongue, and he simply turned the sense off when he took off his work gloves, his hat protecting him from the sun, his boots caked in soil, ignoring transmissions from the inside of his home, the inside of society. 

He enjoys his last cup of sake in the house he was raised in. He knows that even if he brought the same sake back to Miyagi, it would simply be diesel to run his heart like a combine harvester.

“I’m going to walk through the house one last time. It’s fine if he has another cup, Masa, but I have to take us on the expressway,” Natsuo goes inside. 

“Can’t remember him ever rejecting alcohol,” Ittetsu mutters. Masaichi quirks his eyebrow. 

“I’ll pour this time. There’s times to be proper and times to be improper,” the middle-aged man says. His voice is weary, but not in a manner that is intended to be burdensome to the teenager. 

“You’re not an only child, right?” 

“My brother was born the same day my grandfather passed away.” 

“I remember that now. Eiko had a newborn at Yoshi’s funeral. We must not have met, but I remember seeing you.” Ittetsu doesn’t really remember it, but he remembers his mother driving them home, his father and Kaname both asleep. 

“So he’s 4 or 5, I guess… 6? I was never good at math in school,” Masa says sheepishly. “Or maybe years are just harder to count.” 

Ittetsu sips the second serving of sake. Masaichi is not a simple man. 

“I think that you’re right,” he agrees, then feels emboldened to ask what he was wondering. 

“Masa-san, were you and my uncle…” suddenly the boldness dissipates, just leaving a heat in his cheeks. He himself has had feelings, fleetingly, that he did not explore, and could admit that for a much older man, Masaichi is handsome and truly warm, novel to Ittetsu, the Takedas and Moniwas both tending to run cool. He imagines the moments of mundane intimacy he’d seen between his parents -- His mother shaving his father the day he met with a man with a shop who wanted to sell the strawberries in Ginza, in Tokyo, a glittering place like the ocean or the stars and as inconceivable from this vantage point in a small farm community in Fukushima. Little motions that spoke to tenderness, his father checking his mother’s back for a pore or a rash, or brushing her hair. She adding more negi to his father’s portions, or him leaving a dish of onigiri or fish cakes for when she came home late, his gentle touch not mashing the rice or making the meat too springy, earning his mother in-law’s approval. He wonders about what knowing and being known so closely was like, if he ever would.

All he could tell is that this was how Masaichi had known his uncle.

Masa drains his cup and looks at it. 

“I’m two-and-a-half years old than Iesada,” he says. “I’m almost forty.” 

Alcohol definitely makes his mind wander more, as Ittetsu can’t follow this thread, except to make a pointless note that Masaichi is close to his mother’s age. 

“He gave more than half his life to me. For twenty years, we were devoted to each other. His parents could tolerate us. It was enough.” He puts down the cup. 

“I thought it was enough.” 

Ittetsu feels so much more powerfully under the effects of alcohol, like the volume’s been turned up, that he can’t distinguish the tones in how he feels. 

“Masa-san, did my uncle commit suicide?” He hears himself say these words that bypassed the filtration system of his mind. 

Masa nods. The sun is setting. 

“He left just a simple note. He tore part of it out of a book we read years ago. I did not -- go to high school, but the Moniwa brothers, that is, Iesada and your father, did. So I was introduced to more complex writing. Over time he seemed to find himself incapable of trusting himself to speak truth of his heart, unless he had someone else's words to edit.” 

“May I… ask what book?” Ittetsu asks timidly. Iesada sounds more like himself than Ittetsu is comfortable with. 

Masaichi looks at him, reaches into the breast pocket of his shirt, and unfolds a yellowed half page forever ripped from the completeness it was created for. He glances back, Natsuo still upstairs, and passes it to Ittetsu.

Kokoro. Ittetsu read this many times. His uncle’s simpler writing deliberately, and strikethroughs changing the context in which Natsume's words are controlled to create something utterly different; that feels deeply intimate that even shared with him, feels like a violation. He glances back, but Masa looks away, to give him a moment with his uncle's truth, as it existed

* * *

_My Masa, i am so sorry; For so long I have loved you. But in me, life wilts. My family's garden was poisoned, and I am not stable enough to not grow poisoned_

I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look

~~till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then~~

I felt respect for you. Because you unreservedly showed me your resolution to catch something alive in my being

 ~~and to sip the warm blood running in my body, by cutting~~ my heart

 ~~At that time,~~ I was still living, and

 ~~did not~~ want to

 ~~die. So I rejected your request, promising to~~ satisfy you some day

~~Now~~

I am going to destroy my heart myself, and pour my blood into your veins

I shall be happy if a new life can enter into your bosom, when my heart has stopped beating

 _I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry. I_ _will never satisfy you_

_Please live. My honesty. My absolute truth_

_Please do not be poisoned_

* * *

Ittetsu folds it exactly as it had been, and offers it back to Masaichi, dipping his head, for allowing a boy he only knew slightly briefly into light of his heart that cast such heavy shadows. 

“I wondered, I saw my father drinking and speaking to him, though he was alone. And he was crying,” Ittetsu says quietly, then adds, “I’m so sorry, Masa-san.”

The older man nods again. There’s nothing more to be said.

He begins to quietly cry for someone he only knew faintly, but he feels as though he is doing it for his father, and for Masa, because he knows they can’t. He feels Masa, after a moment of hesitation, put his hand on his shaking shoulder. Natsuo looks at them coming down the stairs, having not even found a ghost. He looks down at his pocket. It’s still weighted with a full flask. It’s a weight he could relieve at a cost, and today, that cost would be too much.

There is nothing easy in life. Shortly, he and Ittetsu, who has long learned the pantomime expected, that fathers and sons cannot cry in front of each other, depart and take the grove and Natsuo takes his heart away from this house, leaving Masa, shaking hands at the correct tempo. To Ittetsu, it feels cruel. But there’s nothing left to be done. 

Ittetsu falls asleep on the highway. Natsuo does not disturb him, only a single thing uttered quietly as he glances at his mirrors, towards the ocean beyond the horizon, away from his son. 

“I am so sorry.” 

When they get home, Kaname tells him there are surprises. Kaname’s is, unsurprisingly, that he and cousin Issei finished the gunpla kit he had been working on for a couple weeks. Kaname certainly was, he had to admit, more aware of his body, his hands, and how to use them than Ittetsu was. It looks good. 

“Mama has a surprise too, though,” he says. “She told me today.” 

“Oh, what’s that?” Ittetsu asks, a faint headache from his first drinks, a long drive, and an open wound in his heart that he knows no treatment for. Still, he had time for Kaname if Kaname wanted him. It was one of the only virtues he both valued and adhered to. 

Downstairs, Natsuo holds his wife. “You’re sure?” 

“Yes.” 

The seasons are life, and death, and life again. 

“Mama says we’re going to have a little sister!!” Kaname seems delighted by the turn of events.

Ittetsu wonders if the world is darkly ironic or if it just has messengers that are getting tired of his father not answering them. Or maybe life, and death, really is just random. He has school tomorrow. He’ll think about this later, or he won’t. 

Either way is fine with him. 

* * *

  
  


“How much did we spend last month on…” Natsuo’s voice drifts off. Eiko sits in a loose dress and hanten as they look over the household bills. The wind blows outside, rattling the doors to the garden. 

“Kaname needed new clothes for school.”

“Right… I forgot. That explains the credit charge… What’s this?” 

“The gas bill, dear.” Ittetsu is at the stove while they talk, Kaname precariously balanceing on a small stool watching and questioning in a precocious manner as his brother prepares dinner. He watches closely. 

“Big brother, you should curl your fingers in, when you cut,” he said, demonstrating the position he meant. “It’s safer, I think. I think the bigger knife would be better for the potatoes, too.” 

“Huh.” He was more confident to go quicker, and more evenly, following Kaname’s suggestion. “Do you watch cooking shows?” Kaname shakes his head. 

“It just looked like your hand position was cramped. With the smaller knife, it, uhhh,” Kaname struggles with words sometimes, yet language was the only building material Ittetsu could do anything with.

“You end up pulling it and it isn’t a smooth cut,” he finally settles on, looking a little embarrassed, pretty sure he picked a word that wasn’t technically correct. He much preferred being technically correct. 

“You’re good with your hands, little brother,” Ittetsu says, and means it. Kaname looks a little bashful. 

“But you did the work!”

“In half the time because you taught me. Thank you.” 

This moment is interrupted by their father coming in, getting a can from the fridge. 

“Oh, sorry -- you’re done preparing it already?” He asks. 

“It’s just simmering now. I was going to give Kaname a little portion of rice before dinner, since he helped.”

His dad leans against the counter and sips. Each sip angers Ittetsu. He knows this is at least the third drink his father’s had today. He never objects like this, but somehow his filtration system breaks. 

“Stop drinking in front of Kaname,” he says. His tone is authoritative. Kaname looks confused. His father looks like too many things. 

“Who is ordering his father around in his own house?” He says sharply. 

“I don’t want him or little sister to be exposed to that constantly.” 

His father looks down at his beer, “So I ruined you, that’s what you mean, You, my parents, Ie…” 

“What?” Before the interjection is even complete his father’s rushed closer to him than he ever does. His first instinct is, 

“Kaname, go to mom. I’ll bring you the rice in a minute.” 

The child complies, looking over his shoulder as Natsuo continues. 

“You think I’m a bad parent. Well, fine, I guess I am,” Natsuo gestures wildly with the can, and some amber droplets spill. Ittetsu reaches for a dish towel. 

“I think you shouldn’t do finances while drunk.” He folds the towel in half and bends down to wipe the droplets on the floor. 

“You drink once and you think you can tell me what to do, boy? You think I’m just another mess to clean up?” Ittetsu feels a sticky stream hitting his head, a drainage of anger. “There, there’s your mess. Drink up. You have no guts. You just bow your head and defer to whoever,” his father’s words turn to ranting. 

“Deference to others can have a tactic. Deference to alcohol gives you no leverage,” he mutters, no longer wiping the floor, just kneeling. 

“Get up, damn you.” 

“No.” 

“Then -- get out of my house.” 

“This is my Grandmother and Grandfather's house. The Takedas.” Ittetsu sees the shadow over him and flinches. 

“Get out. If I spoke to my parents like that --” 

“Like what? With a spine? With concern?” Ittetsu finally shouts. “Then maybe Grandpa Yoshi would have quit smoking so much and he could have met my siblings!” 

He braces to be hit. He knows the line he is walking on is about to snap, and he isn’t sure if there's a net to catch his fall. Instead he almost hates that he hears the fridge open again, and Natsuo finally speaks. 

“I said it twice,” Natsuo murmurs darkly. “If you’d just obey instead of trying to provoke me…” 

“Both of you.” Eiko is not so far along with her third pregnancy that she couldn’t move at a lightning-pace after Kaname ran to her with distress he did not comprehend. Ittetsu’s demeanor changes immediately as she speaks. 

“I soothed Kaname and sent him upstairs to play before dinner. Now what have you done. Both of you.”

“Mother, please, he’s been drunk all the while you were looking over the finances --”

“Ittetsu, do you take me to be a stupid woman?” He’s caught wordless by this question before a feeble response.

“No.” Natsuo watches him defer to his mother, and moodily sips from the fresh can. 

“Then perhaps you can exist outside yourself for a minute and realize I know my husband of twenty years! If you see him opening the fridge, tell me, who is the one looking at the receipts?” He knows she’s right. He doesn’t speak in response, though. She doesn’t seem to want that as she redirects to her husband.

“Natsuo, mop up the mess, please.”

“There’s some _thing_ in the way,” he says, “Are you able to move _it_ ?” Ittetsu realizes _it_ is _him_ , and stands, his dark hair like his mother’s matted and sticking to his forehead. The smell will stick to him like fermented fruit stuck to itself, its sugars and pectin barely holding a shape, his soul barely holding its own.

“It can move itself,” he replies, ducking into a closet and grabbing a towel. There’s a bath next to the grocery store in the valley, not so far. It’s getting dark, but that’s true inside or out. 

“Natsuo! Ittetsu!” Eiko struggles, giving her husband a look and a glance at the puddle on the floor, and following their son. 

“Get back here,” she says, finding him tying his shoes. 

“He said out. I’m going to do just that.” 

“Did you have to start with Kaname watching?” He stands and stares her in the eyes. 

“He started, as far as I can tell from your discussion, from drinking away your children’s futures.”

“That’s not fair and not what we were discussing.” She reaches out and rubs the towel across her son’s forehead, and she can see behind his lenses that some droplets are not beer, but tears. 

“I -- I shouldn’t have acted like you’re enabling him. I don’t think you’re stupid. I’m sorry, mama,” he says quietly, and they both hear a tin clank from the kitchen, the cleaning bucket set in its corner, then the television switch on and a soft thump. Ittetsu almost appreciates this… Consideration? 

“I forgive you. I just need you to be more understanding,” she pleads to him. “You know he isn’t a bad person, he makes mistakes, he’s a person just like you and me --” 

Ittetsu doesn’t even bother hiding his scorn for this. “Well that is truthful; People really do create their own suffering for no reason,” he mutters. He then looks through his mother, whose expression has lost his softness once more. 

“Of course I understand. He’s an ordinary man who was tempted,” Ittetsu edits Natsume Soseki's words just as Iesada did, as a proxy, as he pulls on a jacket and steps out the door. “We all are," he continues, saying words he doesn't truly understand, but have read in one form or another and happened to reassemble. "But father that I remember from age six is not that man sprawled out in front of the TV right now, letting bills pile up, self-pitying, Father --” 

“-- Kaname and little sister,” he gestures vaguely at her, where arms that touched him so softly are wrapped around her form like trash clinging to a telephone poll after a storm, grasping each other like she's shielding her heart from the unique cruelty of adolescence, that weapon most teenagers curiously pick up and, at least once, wound someone with it. “Are not, and will not, be raised by the same man I was.” 

“We’re going to trial separation while he goes to an alcohol rehabilitation center,” The precision strike of that revelation is a scorched earth counterattack against her eldest. 

His arsenal is now ashes. He just stares at the woman haunting the doorway, the only light this far in the rural suburbs simply the pinholes between earth and the heavens, stars no man would ever know. 

“In Sendai?”

“No.” Ittetsu ignores a call from his heart and it leaves a voicemail on his mind saying

 _Kaname is going to start school and you'll_ _both be abandoning him. He never got what you had._

“I waited for a good reason. To tell you. Because I didn’t want to interrupt your preparation for university. Because even if... even if you won’t acknowledge the Natsuo that raised you is still around us, wanting to inhabit our lives again, I can always tell that in your heart _Kaname is still your brother, This child will still be your sister. I will always be your mother._ “

Kaname often asks questions. _Why can you read kanji in different ways? Why do some animals have different shaped ears? Can you really teach me_ **_anything_ ** _? Who was that poet you read me last week?_

He holds no real insecurity over their gap in age. If anything it is a comfortable distance that allows him to have messengers made out of long dead authors, or bits of trivia; Words interpreted and borrowed to form a brotherly lexicon. He thinks of many moments since Kaname’s birth. 

_Itte-nii, this is English, right? what does this say?_

Where did you get that can?

_Papa left them in the burnables. He must have forgot._

,,, Yeah. 

_But can you read it for me?_

‘Suntory’. It’s just the company’s name. Brands often use these letters for logos.

_Oh, like ‘Fanta’._

Like that. 

Or in the last couple months

Good-night, little brother. 

_Itte? Can I ask you another question?_

You will anyway. 

_I don’t think daddy is happy right now._

What? Did he do something? 

Ittetsu turns,

trampling

tatami

thoughtlessly

to defend a

tender tree sapling

Kaname, please tell me now, did he do something?

_No, I mean --_

_Daddy’s been sad for a long time. I’m scared I did that._

You?

_That I made him sad by being here._

A teenager steps out of his room of one’s own, crossing a bridge a decade long, to hold his brother, and abandon the borrowed words to say _never, never, never, you will hold us together, I’m sure, never think that about yourself,_ babbling brotherly love like a brook unused to overflowing, a garden drowning like a rice paddy. Eiko sees them from the well-lit hall, only seeing the pain of honesty in its unconditional beauty in the shadows. 

Kaname is a friendly ghost in the back of his mind, but all the same, Ittetsu doesn’t want him there; it is not a place for a child in primary school. It’s a place for a child about to graduate high school. 

“You love too much for how much wisdom you have, Ittetsu. The blowback hits you,” his mother says from the threshold she had crossed nearly every day of her life. “I waited to tell you until after entrance exams, and Aunt Naoko or Saito-san will be here sometimes when papa and I are… doing our work,” she concludes with a precise choice of words. 

“How long?” 

“I don’t know... “ 

“What about when --”

“Ittetsu. The ice is thickening my blood. Are you staying in or stepping out?” 

Ittetsu glances at his watch. It's still fairly early in the evening, as a pediatrician, a five year old, and an asocial drunk don’t keep vampire hours. 

“I’m going to go down to the bathhouse. Don’t worry,” he unsheathes the weapon of words without even noticing it had survived the earlier bombshell. “Even if I drink I won’t end up like that.” 

Eiko glances over her shoulder, her immense exhaustion apparent, backlit as she opens the door.

“I know that,” she says, but it is not followed by _I trust you_.

“Your addiction isn’t to drinking, but to thinking. Don’t let that get you in trouble, either.”

Two people say “love you”, but they’ve both already closed every door between them.

  
  


Ittetsu strips the shirt off at the bath, wondering what to do with it. It stinks. He wants to throw it in the garbage, but that feels wasteful. There’s an empty plastic bag left behind in the lockers that he puts it in. Compartmentalized inside a compartment. In a bag, in a locker, in the back of his mind.

There’s only one other person in the bath. An older man. He seems intent to sit in the hottest soaking tub as long as is humanly possible. 

Not a minute after washing off and getting in the other tub, hugging his knees and watching the islands they make disappear under the fog on his glasses, the old man calls to him.

“You look way young to be drinking.” Ittetsu is immediately irritated by this; Yet he does not speak. He’s already seen where speaking gets him. 

“Oi, kid, I mean you.”

“There’s nobody else here,” he replies, then echoes his mother. “Do you think I’m stupid?” 

“Sure," says the old guy, which throws Ittetsu off.

“I’m just taking a bath.”

“Because you can’t go home. I can smell it, kid. You in high school? I work at one.”

Well, he’s now stuck in a conversation with an abrasive grandpa. Ittetsu’s gone through a whole range of emotions tonight, but now he’s convinced there’s something fucking with him and he’s losing patience. He’s been losing patience for years. He wonders if you ever get a refill on that. He sure hoped so.

“I wasn’t drinking. It was spilled on my shirt.” It was spilled. It just came out of nowhere and spilled itself. Who knows why things spill, in this world? Gravity could carry so much of the responsibility, surely. It spilled. 

“Where were you a thing like that would happen?” Come on. Come on. 

“My family’s kitchen, with my father standing over me and my little brother watching. Are you done yet, old man?” He snaps. 

Finally there’s a break in the back and forth. Thankfully. It felt like a combat sport, talking to this guy.

“You and he fight a lot?” The old guy’s tone is a little different, somehow. However, now Ittetsu doesn’t really know the right answer. They didn’t hit each other. They traded cruelties, but not often, only harshly. Still no good answer, at least none that would satisfy the man.

Ittetsu doesn’t realize he’s speaking. “We fight a little. I think because neither of us realize he isn’t the father who raised me until his father died.” He saves the sentence before it turns into ‘ _until he became Kaname’s father’._ Kaname did nothing but be born. He had no control over the forces of life and death any more than he controlled the tides. He draws buildings he sees when he visits cousin Keiji and was excited when Aunt Naoko and Cousin Issei moved here and he never knew their grandparents like Ittetsu did and he’s just a child, a curious child who is loved by all his family. 

All the same, he feels he has to clarify:

“His father died the same day my brother was born, and... He did drink when he was my father,” he says absently, “But for over half a decade its been…” 

He rests his forearms on his knees and leans his head forward, daring his glasses to jump, daring the water to rise, daring himself to control this tiny spot in the universe. Nothing changes. He looks back up after a moment, up at the man. 

“You said something kind of interesting there,” he points at Ittetsu. “You said, ‘was’ your father.”

Ittetsu shrugs. “He doesn’t feel like the same person. I don’t know him as I knew him before.”

“That’s just growing up.”

“No.”

“A person can’t change?” Ittetsu struggles here because he knows that people change. They get older and their tastes change and they look different and they die and are born.

“I know that people change,” he says, his tone not convincing either of them he believes that.

“OK. You know it in your mind. As a concept. What does your heart tell you?”

“My heart and I don’t speak anymore.” His tone is flat and brusque, verging on unintentionally comic, but in his head he holds the thing he’s afraid his heart will say, no matter what he asks it. 

_I’m thirsty. I’m thirsty. I’m so thirsty._

_"Please say anything else. Please_ ,” he fears begging.

**_You’re_ ** _so thirsty._

He shudders. This must be where curses are born. What a horrible burden, a heart.

“You think so? You should embrace that remarkable illusion.” _A remarkable illusion._ The phrase gets stuck in his head. _Everyone, near and far, come see the remarkable illusion! Two boys that are brothers, from the same parents, yet this man is only the father of one! How can such a thing be, people?_

There was always an adult within arms reach for Ittetsu. If not his mother, his father, if not him, his grandmother, his grandfather. He had so much of each of them that he didn’t need the same amount of love from each of them to equal, in his mind, the love of one father, one mother, one grandfather, one grandmother. Their affection was a mélange, indiscrete, and to reconstitute it as distinct loves would be as pointless as dissecting a pillow and sorting the feathers by which bird each came from; impossible, and having destroyed a comfort for no reason at all. 

He loved them all. The consistency was no longer the same. Kaname did not act as though he wanted for more love, but he had less variety in affection, and more moments to learn what being alone was. Ittetsu’s understanding of it, outside of a thing that exists between people that he generally didn’t mind until he did, was underdeveloped. 

Kaname started the rice for dinner tonight without Ittetsu asking, he remembered. He’d figured it out a while ago, after grandmother was gone and he was hungry and so using the stools, the mop bucket, and so on, conceived of a -- for a toddler, very clever -- utterly dangerous means of climbing up on the counter, proceeding with measuring the rice and water using memories from watching his family night after night. He hummed along with the little tune that played when one started the cooker, the platonic image of a child’s want rising in expectation, staring at the hard little grains and back at the cooker like he was asking it _how do you do this?_ That day the three others walked in almost simultaneously, Ittetsu coming downstairs, his mother coming home, his father drifting between two places just to loathe himself in a different light. It was surreal, and after their mother made sure he was ok, he sat on his fathers knee and his father smiled just a little while he happily ate. 

_“Why didn’t you ask Father or I?” Ittetsu asked him. “You knew where we were.”_

_“I think you were busy,” he slowly assembled the sentence. “I mean I thought.” He proceeded to eat while his parents and Ittetsu shared a confused look. “But that’s okay.”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_“It’s okay if you’re busy. I know you’ll come. You’re my brother and mama and papa. I learned that. You come when I’m alone.” He took a last bite._

_“Also, Itte, you smelled the rice, I think.” His parents started to laugh._

“Kaname’s still my brother,” he says, jolted from this memory. “Yet… The love I felt from my father isn’t the same shape it was. It’s not just changed. It’s…lost something.”

He asks his heart what he says next. 

It did not say _I’m thirsty. You’re thirsty._

“I have lost something as well, I think,” he admits. “I think whatever we lost was what anchored our bond.”

Finally, the old man’s expression is less sour and impatient, waiting for Ittetsu to talk himself inside out. 

“So what do you want to do?” 

He blinks at his own hazy reflection. “Take the long route to see each other eye to eye.” 

“-- Okay… That is…?”

“We both love my mother, and we both love Kaname, and we will both love my little sister. Even without our anchor… With them we can be family.” Ittetsu cups water in his hands, continuing, “shaped like a family.” He pulls his hands apart and the fluid loses its form and rejoins the vast ocean of the tub. 

“And we don’t have to try to be when it's only the two of us.” 

“Well, I’ll give you this much. It’s creative. If you think you can do it.” The guy crosses his arms. “There’s going to be hurt feelings over this plan you have.”

“It would hurt anyway,” he answers, and receives a satisfied smile in return. 

“Maybe you aren’t that stupid. What’s your name again? Call me Ukai.”

“I hadn’t said it. Its Mo--” His throat is suddenly choked, overgrown like the back garden had become. He tried again, but saying, “My name is Moniwa Ittetsu,” after the solution he came to, feels like a betrayal of the thought process he’d just gone through. 

“Takeda Ittetsu,” he tries it on, and it covers his nakedness.

“It was interesting meeting you, Takeda Ittetsu. You look like you washed off the stain.”

“I did.” He hears Ukai get out of the tub. He’s been here so long now he feels he should get out as well. Instead he traces two kanji on the surface of the water with the tip of his fingers. 

“My name is Takeda,” Ittetsu says to the water, telling it a temporary secret that only he and the old man knew. When he steps into the lockers there's a folded-up clean white undershirt sitting on the bench for someone a bit larger than him. The old man's lighting a cigarette outside, swearing at the wind as it chases the flame out several times.

“Isn't it a bit pointless to change back into your dirty clothes after a bath?" Ittetsu asks.

"I'm old. Nobody but my grandson cares if I rewear the same clothes. He only cares because he's at the age I'm just too uncool for him," Ukai says with a grin. "Mothers like to see their children like they were after the nurse cleaned them and put them in her arms for the first time." He finally gets the cigarette lit, and it's a comforting smell to Ittetsu. It reminds him of Fukushima and persimmons hanging in the window.

"Thank you." 

"What? Nobody comes here at this time usually. I was trying to figure out why you were there."

"Well, I hope that me washing that stain did not disturb you."

Ukai looks away. "Well. You weren't bad company." He takes another long drag. "Besides however this chapter with your father ends, have you got any plans for the future?"

"Everyone in my family does something. They mend, or cultivate, or heal, or build and rebuild. I can't do any of that. I'm just smart, just clever." 

"Humble too?"

"I enjoy teaching my brother things. I had thought about teaching. You work at a school, you said. Do I seem suited for it?"

Ukai contemplates it. "Well, you might be. I wouldn't know. I teach people how to do something, but I don't know what you'd teach. On the other hand, there's plenty of subjects that I don't know what the hell people do with them." He glances back at the teenager. 

"Worth a try, anyway. If it doesn't work you leave. If it works you stay." Ukai checks his watch. "My grandson is definitely pissed off, wondering where I am… He doesn't have to be your father, but he should see your face before he goes to bed. He'll worry all night otherwise."

Ittetsu thanks him and heads home.

_If it doesn't work you leave. If it works you stay._

He is able to be civil to his father. They apologize to each other. He doesn't seem like he was drinking after Ittetsu left, but he knows that his father will drink again. He will probably drink in the morning. 

But soon his father is not here. 

Soon he lives on the end of a telephone. 

Soon Kaname is fretful at night while their mother sleeps. He’s worried about Mommy. He misses Aunt Nao who was there today. He misses Daddy, who is at a place that Kaname cannot imagine, only a lonely void. He doesn’t want to miss Ittetsu, who he knows is going to start something called university. Ittetsu felt so guilty at failing to explain rehab conceptually, much less as a place, that one Sunday he takes Kaname to see the campus he would be at in the city. This seemed to help; When the taller buildings only serve to frame plants, though, he points and identifies them, each one painfully preceded by his soft voice saying, ‘Daddy told me that’s called --’. 

Ittetsu almost replies, perhaps more than once, ‘He taught me that when we were father and son, too.’ He's glad when he bites his tongue and nods instead.

Kaname doesn’t see him nod, much like Natsuo doesn’t see the nods in the awkward pauses transmitting nothing, the moments of loneliness together after and before and within the first real conversations between Ittetsu and he. Would the sound of cicadas, the smell of the autumn breeze, the feeling of fresh snow, the sight of the first buds on the peach trees and the bite of the ripened fruit be as precious sensations without the times between the experience of them? 

He thought he had done, besides the drinking, a fine enough job as a father; supporting his wife’s career while providing for his family. Being a good son in-law to his wife’s parents. Putting away money for Ittetsu and, later, Kaname, even if sometimes it was smaller for the cost of a case of relief from himself. Not working with products and methods that refuse to let the sparrows grow and fly. 

But he hadn’t heard the sparrow’s song. 

It’s on the phone that he hears Ittetsu explain how the love of family made sense to him. That being Takeda Ittetsu wasn’t a denial of Natsuo -- it was an acknowledgement of his grandparents as part of what raised him that Kaname hadn’t known, wouldn’t remember, wouldn’t inform his life the same way. It’s on one of these calls that Ittetsu says 

“.. I understand the ways in which Uncle Iesada felt” The space between begins. 

  
  
  


“love.” 

Natsuo sits at a plain little desk with a plain little phone and he cries as plainly as he can and his heart hurts. He feels the color of his life changing; no drowning in the amber shade, he would swim up, up, through the plain white shades of the rehabilitation center. He had no idea what color was on the other side of the foam whiteness. But his life had entered a season never written of in an almanac. 

“I was reading a new novella today. Kawakami. A line stuck with me."

"Yes?"

Ittetsu's voice becomes fragile, after he flicks open a paperback.

"'If the love is true, then treat it the same way you would a plant—fertilize it, protect it from the elements—you must do absolutely everything you can.'" He takes a shaky breath deep as though he's drowning on dry land. Natsuo's throat is scorched from his subsided silent sobs.

"'But if it isn’t true, then it’s best to just let it wither on the vine.'” 

"Which do you believe I should do?"   
  
  
"I don't know."

"Should I?" 

The silence between.

"I think," Ittetsu says softly after contemplation, knowing soon Natsuo will have to again pause existing in this liminal auditory space until the next time he punches in Ittetsu's cell phone number, but wanting to give a proper answer, "That the love..." 

"Perhaps it is not the plant we thought it was, and was receiving the incorrect care." 

* * *

“Are you going to hire help?” Ittetsu began dressing smartly in college, cycling through several styles including more eccentric ones, for a time, but all that remained of that was a piercing in his ear cartilage that he was thinking of taking out. It made it irritating when he wore headphones in the library. His cuff just slightly hangs from his wrist as he strangles the neck of the sake, waiting for Natsuo to reply. 

The condensation on the bottle leaves rings on the porch, a binary star system on red pine. Ittetsu picks up a small box made of the porch’s cousin; umbrella pine, purchased on a trip with an ex-boyfriend to Nagano. He lifts the bottle to pour himself another cup. The larger pine box that contained them in the shop in nests of shredded paper now holds the last peaches of summer. 

“No, I don’t think I will.” Ittetsu pauses as he tilts the mouth towards the cup. Natsuo’s hair is growing back after he shaved it close for a couple years, and it grew back a lighter shade than it was; he holds a few chrysanthemums. There had been some sort of pest preying on them for a while, but they had recovered. “Hopefully those insects don’t come back,” he says to himself, avoiding expanding his answer.

Ittetsu just looks at him for a moment, glances at the flowers, and sets the sake down to create another mark charting the orbit of the star. 

“Why don’t you just use imidacloprid or something?” He asks. He sort of knows the answer, but it’s better than pressing for explanation. In the pause there’s a delighted noise on the far side of the garden.

“I’ve never used neonicotinoids. We didn’t back at my father and mother’s house, either. As organic as possible.” 

“It’s more work, though. Isn’t it?” 

“It is,” Natsuo concedes. “But if I used them the sparrows would die.” 

A little girl with pigtails bursts out of the bushes by the treeline in the back and runs through the grass, barefooted and giggling, cheeks streaked with dirt. Her brother, also streaked with dirt, in pursuit, calling for her to not go crawling around back there. She stops and turns, methodically explaining that she wanted to see if Totoro, the cartoon character, was back there. 

“I guess they would,” Ittetsu replies. He sips the sake. It had been difficult to find, even after calling Masaichi to ask him about it. He eventually just called a specialty omiyage shop in Fukushima City and drove down for it. 

The other cup is still empty. 

“Kento and Ito come over sometimes. The twin brothers from the Kinoshitas, who grow the rice we cook with. Depending when harvest is, usually I have one or two people who’ll come over and help. Kaname, of course,” he says, gesturing to the child, who is now busy cleaning his sister’s face. 

“He says we should replace that pump.” 

“Kaname does?” 

“Yeah. He’s pretty observant. The handle gets stuck these days and wastes water, he says.” 

“It’s good he noticed that.” 

“Yeah. Maybe it would be a good thing if he joined a sport or something to make a few friends. He’s good at looking after his sister, but, besides when he sees Keiji and Issei he doesn’t spend much time with kids his age, and I think he wants to.” He keeps holding the cup. 

“Mother told me about her sisters,” Ittetsu says. 

“Oh -- yes. I am glad you accepted her invitation to come.” 

“Well, their children are my cousins. I’m not busy right now. I’m waiting on my advisor to get back to me.” So not busy he could make a two-hour round trip for a bottle. 

Why did he do that, he wondered? Did he mean it as a gift, a taunt or a temptation? He keeps asking his heart, but it never answers.

"I never withered, here," he says unprompted. Natsuo looks past him. 

"I was always tended to here." 

"You needed less tending than you thought you did," Natsuo says, in a fatherly manner. He gestures to the trellis behind Ittetsu, where, for as long as Ittetsu can remember, beautiful, virginal white flowers erupted and climbed for a short period with their heady, sweet fragrance blanketing the air as the vine crawled down onto the earth. He remembered that one, as his father held him when he was his son, warning him that this was one of the only plants in the garden he had to be careful of. Even though it smelled sweet, it was poison. It was tenacious, a persistent perennial if there ever was, hungry as it was clever. 

"That one is... clematis terniflora, right?" 

The bottle is picked up gently. 

"Yes." 

"Grandmother said it was unmanageable," Ittetsu looks at the bursts of blossoms up and down it.

"It isn't that bad," Natsuo objects, “Everything causes trouble for someone at some point in its life.” Ittetsu smiles slightly. 

"But it's never going to be balanced in its need to grow stuck in a garden. Some things... want for a wider field. I can't fault them for that." 

Ittetsu stares at it. He'd seen it growing up walls and other structures, unsure what it was reaching for. He feels his arm being nudged. Natsuo is holding one of Iesada's peaches. 

"They began to fruit this season." Ittetsu's gaze travels from one hand that offers to the other. It holds the other pine box. 

Ittetsu takes the peach. 

"I'm glad." The fruit is deeply ripe, the rosy tinge near the bulbous top almost dark like a wound on the off-white.

A bite. A sip. 

"How does it taste?" Ittetsu questions as he picks up one of the other peaches, offering it to his siblings who are running over after washing off. Natsuo sits and holds it in both hands. He poured just the smallest amount. The late summer sun catches he small pool left at the bottom, impossible to drown in. 

"It tastes like enough. Are you still thirsty?"

Ittetsu could not lie. "I am." 

"It's in your nature. Let me pour you another cup." A peach bleeds juice all over little hands cleaned for the purpose of becoming dirty. Eiko steps out to the porch after changing from her work clothes.

For the moment, they are family-shaped. 


End file.
